Jaron Lanier's manifesto for the tech consumer

JARON LANIER, an octopus-loving Silicon Valley software engineer who pioneered virtual reality technology, has a few bones to pick. The technology industry, he says, treats people like machines to be processed for profit. In this sparky, thought-provoking rant on How Things Should Be, Lanier complains that, too often, compelling technologies emerge only for us to discover that their poor, early-stage design has some unattractive side effects. For example, technologies like Google's search-term-sensitive Adwords system treats people as little more than a distributed array of dumb revenue-generating machines, matching people to ads in the same soulless way that Midi music software only picks out stark notes, with no harmonic nuance.

This is good knockabout stuff, and Lanier clearly enjoys rethinking received tech wisdom: his book is a refreshing change from Silicon Valley's usual hype.

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